Guest post: Our slick "Collect Custom Info" feature

This is a guest post by Courtney Duhring from our support team. Courtney will be contributing occasional posts to highlight some great Eventbrite features and tools.

Here in the support team we are eager to spread the word about a truly powerful Eventbrite feature called Collect Custom Information. We speak with a ton of event organizers each day about how they use this tool for gathering data and generating outstanding reports. Want to collect more than just the basic name and email information from your attendees? Let us introduce you to your new best friend! You can choose from a list of commonly used registration fields or create your own custom questions. Whether you need to know the T-shirt size of your attendees or what meal choice they prefer, the possibilities are endless.

To begin, go to your event’s Manage page and select Collect Custom Information from the left sidebar. You will be presented with 3 information collection opportunities:

Scrolling down, a list of checkboxes appears. These are commonly asked questions that can be used in your registration flow. If you’d like to require users to insert their answer before completing registration, check off the appropriate “required” box. If a desired question does not appear in this column, you can click the “Add a Question” button to the right.

Create a new question

This is where the fun begins. Say, for example, you need to know which workshop session registrants plan to attend. Type “Select a workshop” into the title text box. Then, choose “multiple choice” as the type of answer for this question and “radio buttons” from the dropdown menu. This will display each workshop in a list for users to choose from. Now, type the choice options into the textbox spaces provided below. Worried about workshop overflow? You can set a limit for each answer choice. Once the limit is reached, the answer option will appear as crossed out and not available. If you only want workshop selection to apply for a special ticket type, then you can choose the ticket name from the optional settings below.

When you’re done, click the orange Save Changes button. And that’s it! Super simple, yet sophisticated. If multiple choice answers are not your style, you’ve got options. The small text field, large text field, and waiver formats are all available for use.

What’s more, information that you collect from attendees can always be viewed in the Attendee Summary report. Easily accessible and exportable.